Tuesday, February 9

A poem I cherish is "Fern Hill', Dylan Thomas' mesmerizing recollection of his childhood in Wales. I first read it many years ago and was instantly sent flying back on the magic carpets of memory to several summers I spent as a boy at my grandmother's farm in the lush green countryside on the coast of Asturias in northern Spain.

There are many lines and images in Fern Hill that have exerted immense staying power in my mind over the years. The sabbath ringing out slowly in the pebbles of holy streams, the rivers of windfall light, time holding him —and me and all of us, all children— golden in the mercy of his means. He beautifully recounts his days in that Edenic paradise of Adam and maiden, under the sun that is young once only.

Often we hear our tender years referred to as "carefree", and even employ that adjective ourselves, though we surely know the cloying disservice it does to truth. Children are full of cares and concerns, worries and fears. As adults we shed most of them and make room for the great care that children do not have, one that becomes a constant ticking companion as we age — the gathering alarm over the passing of time. In the poem Dylan Thomas projects this awareness back into this memoryscape of his youth, remembering now that he did not then care that time in his tuneful turning allows us just so many morning songs before we follow him out of grace.

It all leads up to the scintillating last stanza, in which time takes him by the shadow of his hand up to the swallow thronged loft, in the moon that is always rising, before he wakes some melancholy morning to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

But certainly don't take it from me. Read and listen for yourselves as the incomparable actor Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins (born in Margam — Port Talbot, Wales) recites Dylan Thomas' 'Fern Hill'. Click on the play symbol for the audio...

The photo of Dylan Thomas at the top of the post was taken in 1952 by Rollie McKenna.The audio is available at the Poetry Out Loud website, a joint project of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.

Saw the movie"The Edge of Love" about Dylan Thomas and his two loves not long ago. It's uneven and I wondered how much of it is fact vs movie fiction. Anyway, he was a raucous fellow, that we know. Too bad so many of the great poets die so young.

He works a lot of synesthesia into it, that may be part of why it is so haunting. I think children are afraid of things adults teach them are silly, then they grow up and learn to be afraid of socially respectable things.

Hi, ArtSparker. Nice to see you here on the blog. I know we frequent some of the same "art blogs". Beautiful word -- synesthesia -- and a new one for me. Thanks. I am like a kid with a new toy whenever I come across a new word. Don't know how socially respectable that is on my part, but it is the truth.

Hi, Bach. Welcome to the alchemist's pillow. I know you from comments on willow's blog and will be checking over at the your pad. Glad you liked the poem and Sir Anthony Hopkin's reading of it. I have heard it so many times but still shake my head in grateful wonder whenever I give it a new listen.

I found a youtube of Hopkins reading it (because I couldn't find a link). I appreciated his pauses at the end of both the penultimate and final stanzas.

The lyricism of this poem, with its childlike syntax, always sends me straight to that child place too, even though I didn't grow up with a farm in my life. There is a trickery about it, a fairy-like magic, and I see the photo of you at 3 here, running into the woods, into a different world, where children hail and climb with bare legs.